Attendees

What we've been working on:

Marc has been working on autogeneration of firmware / kit to be finished up in ~ a month; Fake captive portal by capturing inspection traffic

Pau from Guifi.net - working on the qmp firmware - clouds of about 50 nodes working on this system. Beginning to collaborate with Argentina and Italy on a new firmware project: LibreMesh - Using batman-adv, buhttp://www.guidingtech.com/10346/transfer-android-apps-between-phones-bluetooth/t Layer 2 has problems with scalability, 30-40 nodes hit peak congestion through conflicting ARP requests. So they're using BMX6 (Layer 3) protocol to make connections between Layer 2. They discover Layer 2 clouds and join them. Layer 2 (batman-adv) still helpful to create continuity between nodes.

Shaddih working on an OpenBTS network in Papua, isolated community - 100,000 txt messages sent since February. Using hardware from range networks. Base station cost ~$4-5k. Cost is the biggest problem.

Isaac from Free Network Foundation/Kansas City - their community network is used daily by a few thousand people. Adapted qmp firmware to the Kansas City network. Has been playing with GNU MediaGoblin. Thinking about how to do diverse authentication. WOrking on a Network Commons license.

Mikaela interested in sharing tokens for access to the mesh

Nader working on building a network among the UC Berkeley co-ops

Miguel working on firmware

Mitar built slovenia network on top of an abundance of fiber; Nodewatcher

Guifi.net Operational Structure

Open project - no membership fee or policies - you're a member if you decide you are

Ownership of the network is distributed

License is also important

Tries to automate as much as possible, to avoid manual intervention

Use the tools available to solve problems, avoiding manual operation

Nodes have a physical location, and can become supernodes

Ad-hoc mode not really used. To propagate the network, you must have at least two radios to receive and propagate - this model is sim[ply more supported

No central point of authority - theoretically. Source code public and open, anyone can also set up a network infrastructure

Technology-agnostic - strives to be as inclusive as possible

Tools to check on the statistics of the network

Use BGP (+ OSPF)

Have routing problems - every day, hour, minute! BGP not meant for wifi

Funded by itself - those who want to join must pay the cost of joining it, in charge of upgrading hardware, etc

Up to the people themselves to keep up with maintenance

Normally if a supernode goes down, it will be fixed within the next 48 hours

They have a fundraising option to request money from the network

Mostly run as a web of trust - mostly one degree of separation from each other

Monopolistic mentality is internalized in Western culture -

When they first connected to the Internet, started receiving DDOS attacks

Guifinet Foundation is the umbrella of many small ISPs in the network, using GuifiNet Foundation to connect to the Internet

GuifiNet Foundation as an incubator for small businesses seeking to become their own ISPs

Interested in cultivating a fair competition within the network

Separating organization (run by benevolent dictator) from network (owned by community - can mutiny)

How to deal with legal issues : Refer to EU directives; Telecom directives; referring to govs to get permission to deploy fiber - more complicated because not a traditional ISP; need to keep IP logs - data retention policy - what's the information content of that Ip address, what's discoverable from there?

Who's the ISP, and how is that defined? Usually by size, or commercial interest

Ideas thenceforth:

Give away nodes or sell them for $5 in exchange for attending workshop

The bigger you are, the more weird things you're going to face

CALEA: Comms Assistant for Law Enforcement Act -- local requirements for logging and reporting via industry best practices

Could say we don't log NAT because the technical requirements are too high

wlan-slovenia vs guifi.net

People own the equipment

Slovenia has a lot of fiber

Overabundance of connectivity led to desire to share the bandwidth

What if someone takes my link? steals my data? makes a stupid thing on the internet and i'm blamed?

Solution: vpn tunnels

When a person donates a node, he hosts bandwidth - not IP

Had to develop their own VPN, as the throughput was too slow

300 vs 21,000 nodes - but slovenia is very small :)

International link to austria and to croatia

Longest hop is 40km

How to get wider participation?

Reach out to networks we don't even know about yet

Roger Proposal: Commons For Europe

Code For Europe / Bottom-Up Broadband

Org of Orgs - at the Euro level? nah - talked to some other communities (eg Ninux, Freifunk [difficult as they are separated by city], Funkfeur - toward creating an organization to federate amongst.

What sort of organization do we want?

What kind of participants?

International agreements for participation

We concluded the meeting with a desire to set up a communications framework toward a federation of libre networks, and set up this mailing list in the interim.